Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they're the boss of the class; they're not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.
As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.
The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.
Theatre is one of those things that children will love if they're helped to get there to see it. No child will find his or her own way to the theatre.
The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.
It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.
It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.
You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much.
Seems to me-" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
She was riding a bear! And the Aurora was swaying above them in golden arcs and loops, and all around was the bitter Arctic cold and the immense silence of the North.
There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.
...his face bore an expression that mingled haughty disdain with a tender, ardent sympathy, as if he would love all things if only his nature could let him forget their defects.
If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.
I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at and sometimes a bit lower to type.
I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.
The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don't know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.
The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.
Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.
I love all types of music - jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music - but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.
Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.
I'm just trying to wake up - I'm so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying - I want to wake up first. I wouldn't care if it was just for an hour, as long as I was properly alive and awake.
This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.
D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.
And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
It's only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
The fact was that where Will is concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she'd known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.
I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.
All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.